Ghost’s John O’Nolan and WordPress’s Matthias Pfefferle want to help blogs and long content thrive on the open social web. Meet “the longformers.”
Social networks were built on short posts designed for speed and scale. But what if the next era of the web was built for something deeper?
Two of the social web’s “longformers” are working on this. John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, and Matthias Pfefferle, the developer behind the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, are at the forefront of integrating social features with blogs, newsletters, essays — anything that doesn’t fit in a box of 500 characters or less.
In this episode of Dot Social, the trio talks about rediscovering the magic of the blogosphere; why formatting, identity, and interoperability are tricky problems to solve; and where writing belongs in the next chapter of the internet.
Highlights include:
Mentioned or related to this episode:
🔎 You can find John at https://john.onolan.org/ and Matthias at https://pfefferle.dev/
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @mmccue.bsky.social.
🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new beta from the people at Flipboard. https://about.surf.social/
Social networks were built on short posts designed for speed and scale. But what if the next era of the web was built for something deeper?
In this episode, we're talking about a more under-discussed aspect of the social web: long-form content. Think blogs, newsletters, essays…everything that doesn’t fit in a box of 500 characters or less.
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement; someone who sees the fediverse’s tremendous potential and understands that this could be the Internet’s next wave.
Today, Mike’s talking to John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, an open-source publishing platform, and Matthias Pfefferle, the developer behind the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, which turns millions of blogs into social web participants. The trio talks about rediscovering the magic of the blogosphere; why formatting, identity, and interoperability are tricky problems to solve; and where writing belongs in the next chapter of the internet.
We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
This is a listener requested episode. Julian Lam requested this. He's from Node BB. I know he was talking to you guys at FOSDEM. That was so I'm excited to get a chance to talk to him as well and do this. So what you know? What a great opportunity to get you guys together and and and talk about how things have been going with both of your platforms and the work you've been doing.
John O’Nolan:
Absolutely, yeah!
Mike McCue:
Why? Why are you guys doing this? And why should writers and bloggers and and people who create the you know content on the internet care about the work you guys are doing?
John O’Nolan:
Matthias, you were first to ActivityPub, I feel like you should lead the way here.
Matthias Pfefferle:
That's a tricky one, because for me, it's the other way around. So I when I started with the whole internet stuff, there was only blogging, and my first social web experience was called Web 2.0 and I called me nostalgic, but I try to keep that momentum and bring back that feeling. And yeah, tried a lot of different protocols and community efforts to bring WordPress into kind of a social network, or be compatible, or be compatible with the social networks back in the days, and ended up with ActivityPub. So that's what I'm currently working with, and I would say it's the most successful decentralized social network experience so far. So I'm really hopeful.
Mike McCue:
That's fantastic. How about you? John,
John O’Nolan:
Yeah, well, like Matthias, my start was kind of around the web, 2.0 era, and also with WordPress, also with blogging. And back in those days, we called it the blogosphere. And you know, we all had our individual blogs. This is pre Twitter, and it would be a at least weekly, but for many people, daily ritual of publishing something on your blog and then going and see seeing what your friends had written on theirs and commenting on it, and subscribing to all of them in RSS reader, and having it all in one place. And the web was wild and interesting and free, and everyone's site looked slightly different, and depending on who you followed, you'd get this amazingly diverse range of content from all over the place. And it was a community, but it was a decentralized one. Everyone kind of knew each other, but everyone was posting in their own place as kind of magical. And then, of course, Facebook was already around at the time, but that Facebook was for people who you knew, and blogs were for people who you didn't yet know, but who you shared something in common with, and Twitter kind of made lower the barrier to entry. For that lower the barrier to entry for how much content you need to make, and took off. And as Twitter took off and social networking in short form took off, the age of the blogosphere and of this kind of decentralized garden of beautiful, unique sites slowly diminished, and the faster Twitter penalized external linking, the faster it diminished. And so as Ghost got going, which was kind of right in the middle of this era, it represented, in many ways, the decline of decentralized blogging and sense that people started congregating on centralized platforms. And from the short form platforms that were big and centralized, we moved on to. Long Form ones like medium and at the time, subtle things of that nature, and what they all benefited from was that was easy to get started. It was free, typically, and it had this network built in where the social aspects that used to be the blogosphere was like on steroids. Now you had likes and replies and two way interactions and notifications. It was a step above RSS in every way, in a way that allowed communities to form around topics. And so for those of us on WordPress, on Ghost, on our own websites that kept publishing outside of those networks, the web started to become more and more lonely, and you would hit publish, and then the comments wouldn't really roll in anymore, the way they used to try and post links on Twitter, but that worked less and less. And so for a long time, we had this idea of, what if we could connect Ghost sites together and sort of have this, like Medium type experience of a network between them, but we were a team of like five people. There's no way this could happen. It's like 2017 as well. A year later, ActivityPub got turned into a web standard, and we were like, That's interesting, but we were still a team of about seven people, and so there was really no way to make it happen. But in the past year and a half or so, seeing the traction of ActivityPub, seeing the amount of new platforms like Flipboard, like Threads, like WordPress, who is kind of very early, it felt like the time is now right to kind of revisit this blogosphere concept, but do it with a new web standard that makes it not just something that would work, Ghost to Ghost, but something that work, goes to WordPress, goes to Threads, goes to Flipboard, and have everything combined with each other. So the why is a combination of nostalgia, as Mattias said, and excitement about the possibility of the web we wanted coming back to life.
Mike McCue:
What a fantastic answer, John. I mean, look, I think that the looking both for both of you, what you saw in the past and the promise of the blogosphere and how people were connected in this, you know, decentralized way, but still connected, and recapturing the energy of that that is incredibly exciting, especially now, because I do think that, like one of the things that's much harder now, even on these platforms that are sort of, you know, social on steroids, it's now almost too much steroids, right? It's like it's in and you have AI, you know, sort of magnifying all of that with, you know, a lot of content that doesn't matter, and it's incredibly mediocre, and a lot of a lot of noise, and, and, and also, you know, really, really fundamentally impacting the, the sort of one of the primary discovery models for long form content with SEO.
John O’Nolan:
Absolutely, it's, it's, a mess.
Mike McCue:
It is, it is. It's like, simultaneously a really fantastic opportunity and a set of really significant problems that are getting worse by the day.
John O’Nolan:
Absolutely, I think one of the interesting things we found, I think I can speak for both of us here, Matthias, but you tell me, if I say anything wrong, is the some of the differences between federating short form content, as Mastodon has done for quite a long time now, and then getting into the long form content space, the it's a newer format for ActivityPub in the fediverse at large. And so the compatibility is even more challenging than the what's now better established in the kind of short form space. So it's, the potential is very high, and the friction of turning that potential into reality is also pretty high at the moment.
Mike McCue:
And so from your vantage point, there are a lot of you know, websites and blogs on WordPress. How has, how has the the plugin gone for you, as you, as you started to see people use it. What's their what's their reaction been? How do you feel like it's going?
Matthias Pfefferle:
It's mixed because, because so John already mentioned it, we started with very different approaches to make blogs more social and for for the for a long time, we trained our users that cross posting is that that thing, there is nothing else than cross posting. So we we crafted a lot of plugins where you can decide what you want to share with that special platform, and you were allowed to craft special formats for for different platforms you share your content on. And the biggest problem in early on was to explain to the user that this is no longer cross posting. So you need no Mastodon Threads. You name it account anymore, because your WordPress profile is the account, and others can follow your account. And that was the biggest learning curve. In the beginning, we thought a lot about, how can we federate different blocks with each other, and the there's always the problem. Every block has to activate that or install something so that they can use it. So it would only work for subset of blocks, and it was would be very special to a certain block system, and with ActivityPub, you have, you already have a big social network where you can simply connect with installing the plugin, and that was kind of the aha moment for most of the users. So no longer you have to install something and use one of your social media platforms. And on the other side, you do not have to force others to install the same plugin, because there is already a social network with 1000s and millions of users, and you can simply connect with them and have the same experience with social media. So in the early days, it was about subscribing to an RSS feed, and you had a lot of contacts on medium switches so you could read in the RSS feed, but to comment, you have to leave the RSS tool you use, and had to fill out the comment form you in the best case, you could subscribe to via email if someone commented to your comment, which was another medium. So it was very distracted, and now you have the full potential of a classic social network with likes, comments, shares, you name it. And that is really the aha moment, but we still have to fight against we still have to explain that difference and the opportunity of that in comparison to the the old cross posting times. So that is kind of the big, biggest issue there.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, just building the technology is just, turns out, step one, there's a lot to do to help people understand how to use it, how it relates to the tools they have. And, you know, there is, you know, there have been many different ways to do social with blogs in various ways. This is a completely different model, you know. So John, do you feel are you seeing similar things? Like, you know, people kind of get in your head around like, what, what are you building here? And how do I use this?
John O’Nolan:
Yeah, there's, there's a lot of excitement. That's the main kind of vibe. I think, since last time was on dot social. We were fairly early in the process. Still, was all quite a lot of hypotheticals and philosophical of things that might be. And now there's more reality. And I think for the longest time, going back to the kind of that pre ActivityPublic sphere era, the notion of publishing on your site was this kind of two sided process. You press Publish, and then you go and figure out, did anyone read it? By looking at all these other places, right? If you had RSS feeds, you'd look at your feed burner stats, and then you go for Google Analytics, looking at web traffic. And then when Twitter came along, you'd post on Twitter, and then you'd see who liked and replied there. And now we have everything, Threads, Twitter, Bluesky. It's all over the place. Have so many places to check to figure out, did anyone read the thing that I spent all this time on, and when we first got ActivityPub working in Ghost and sent out the first newsletter that went out directly to the fediverse, like started coming into Ghost, the product, the place where you push publish, started getting notifications, seeing people replying, people are liking, people are reposting. And it was like a It sounds very contrived, but it was like a light bulb moment of, oh, Ghost is no longer just this quiet box where I go and type something and then hope someone read it and try and try and figure out by going to all these places, someone read it now it feels alive. Now I'm opening the products, because there's things happening within it that aren't just what I made. There's external signal coming into what was previously just a blank canvas that I had to paint on. And that was a pretty special moment, seeing that happen in real time. And what we're seeing now in beta is other people having that realization, other people seeing that for the first time. And there's a lot of excitement from the early adopters that we have at the moment going, Oh, I get it. I see and at the same time, probably more motivation than ever. Four, think maybe three. Four years ago, you talked about TV pub, and people like to COP, what these wages? I don't know. Man, what's going whereas now everyone's like, God, I can't deal with these billionaires and their algorithms, please. There must be something different. And you just have to say there might be. And people are ready, ready for a new story, you know? So the timing, the timing feels right.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I love the concept of pushing publish and then seeing the likes and the comments rolling into the app that you pushed publish in. That is, that is, you know, you go from one way to two way, and everything changes.
Matthias Pfefferle:
But it's, it's, it's funny, because there's still people that try to mimic the cross posting style with ActivityPub, which is absurd, but, but we have a lot of requests how people can turn off likes and shares and email notifications for that, which is totally absurd, but yeah…
Mike McCue:
It's like, there's definitely an adjustment period, right you? And the thing that I think is going to probably happen here is that as as a as a writer, you're going to see these comments and likes coming in at an increasing level, and over time, it will be the primary model for how people are interacting and engaging with your content, you know. And you might still be, you know, posting out on X or something like that, because you have some audience there, but, but I hope what starts to happen is that people see that, you know, there's, this is the primary hub, and, you know, again, you know, I think, from a discovery point of view, you know, just because you posted on X does not mean at all that anyone's going to ever see it anyway. Now, because how you you know how Elon is wired those algorithms. You know, if you write a blog critical of Tesla, the chances of you seeing that on X are probably pretty low at this stage right and and then you know, from an SEO point of view, if someone's searching for, you know, content about Tesla or articles about Tesla, the chances of you ever even seeing that link in Google search results are now increasingly lower because you've got these AI summaries up at the top of the Google search results, right? So there, there's increasingly fewer and fewer ways for people to discover this writing, you know, out on these other platforms. Meanwhile, you have more and more people coming into these this the open social web and using a variety of different apps and a variety of different discovery mechanics and following a variety of different people. So I'm hopeful that what we'll start to see is that there'll be this, like increasing level of of discovery to the point where ultimately it will eclipse discovery from any of these other older channels. How far along do you think we are on that journey?
John O’Nolan:
I think we're very far behind. I really do. This is the number one problem our beta users have with figuring out ActivityPub at the moment, is discovery. How do I find anything? And because we, you know, the open web has search engines like Google, and you can search for something, a word, a key phrase, a topic, and it has this giant index of all the websites. And, you know, in the olden days, it would bring up things you actually wanted, and these days, less so. But the idea is that there's an index of content which you can search through activity. Pub doesn't have that yet, and so what we have in all of our respective apps is this search box, which is not really a search box. It is an address bar. It's an address bar like your browser address bar that expects you to type an address that you know and visit it, but users don't understand that, because the address bar and the search bar at some point in browser history merged right? So if you don't type a web address in, you type in a search term, it just works. And the same. On social networks like Twitter or Facebook, you could type in a name or you could type in a key phrase, and you get results. But in most ActivityPub products, if you unless you type in an exact username, you would either get content that's just local to that particular server that you happen to be on, or nothing at all. And that's the single biggest point of confusion we've got. We need some kind of discoverability boost that indexes content from across all of the different servers, platforms, products everywhere makes it easier to surface this stuff, because the promise of discoverability is there, but the reality isn't yet. I know, I know you guys at Flipboard and Surf are working on that. Mike and the Mastodon team have a discovery project that I believe is hoping to solve that problem. Too, but it's definitely a thorn in the side of user adoption as it stands today.
Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, I think the only thing you could use at the moment is a relay, but that is a ton of information you have to keep on your site, yeah, because it's not searchable on the relay, but you can subscribe and store all of that content on your side, but that is a lot of overhead, especially if we're talking about self hosted WordPress or Ghost blogs. That is not doable.
Mike McCue:
One of the things that's really exciting is that there are going to be many different approaches for discovery, many different you know, macro and micro, centralized and decentralized models for discovery, which people will benefit from. This is a place that where people just inherently want more discovery, and I'm pretty excited to see where that all goes. You know, in doing some of the discovery work we've done so far, it's very clear to me that there's not just one model for discovery. That's part of the problem we have today with with the web, right? Everyone has relied on Google or social media apps, and there is, there are so many other ways for discovery to happen. One of the things that you mentioned was the concept of a blogosphere where people were linking to other people, right? And, you know, I talked about this with Molly White at at South by Southwest recently, and I'll put a link to that interview in the in the show notes what she taught. I asked her, How did you get discovered as a as a new writer? How'd you get discovered? And her answer was, her other writers, her heroes, or other people that you know respected her writing, linked to her writing from their blog, so you linked together audiences, right? And that is, that is something we've also lost, right? It can happen. It still does happen, you know, but it's nowhere near as prominent or as formalized as I think it once was with the blogosphere. Is that something you guys are thinking about for for your experiences?
Matthias Pfefferle:
I think for us, it's very special, or for me, it's very special because I'm mostly writing about the technology I'm using, so that is that is a very welcoming audience, and that works quite well, and I receive a lot of comments and likes and shares on my blog posts, but there are a lot of very niche blogs that have really, really have a hard time to get an audience and to get comments, and even for bigger platforms like we just installed it for Do the Woo, which is a very big WordPress podcast, And also they have a really hard time to get their audience on the fediverse, because that is very WordPress specific, and it is not that common in Mastodon or the fediverse itself. So yeah, I think it depends on what you are writing about.
John O’Nolan:
I think one of the best examples in my mind this ever was, was Tumblr. In its heyday, Tumblr was just the most you could sign up to Tumblr and have you know, one or two things you found just because you're like, I'm interested in this, but that repost function on Tumblr was the doorway to endless rabbit holes of things you had no idea existed on the internet that you would discover by virtue of someone you follow reposted some other account you've never heard of. And you go, Oh, that's funny, or that's cool, or that's interesting, or that's what is that? And you click, and you go, Oh, this is great. I'm going to follow this as well. And then that loop perpetuated. So the point where you'd as a Tumblr user, and it's, Hey, you could have a microcosm of niches that you could discover completely organically, just through recommendations by virtue of the Repost, which is effectively, you know, linking to stuff you like. And I'm really hopeful that we are able to replicate some of that dynamic across active environment in a decentralized way, and hopefully eventually with Tumblr itself, is it still coming in? I think that's still the plan, right? Matthias, I'm pretty sure, no, not. I'm not holding it's only news, but I believe that's the ambition.
Matthias Pfefferle:
So the idea was to kind of have that through the back door, because the plan was to bring Tumblr to the WordPress back end, so then it would be as simple as activate. The plugin, but time will tell.
Mike McCue:
Many different ways to get there.
Matthias Pfefferle:
But I experienced that what works quite good in Mastodon is if you use the right hashtags, because Mastodon is doing a quite good job, where you could subscribe to different hashtags and see content from people you don't, do not directly follow. And I experienced that this works quite well if you're using the right hashtags, and that grew my audience quite a lot.
Mike McCue:
How are you guys thinking about AT Proto these days, as there's clearly been a huge rise in users on AT Proto. We have the bridge. There's a variety of different things happening on that front. How are you guys thinking about AT Proto?
Matthias Pfefferle:
That's a hard one. So I'm following their process for quite a while, and I was really, really excited when they first announced that they will open up back in the days Twitter so and the longer the discussion took, the more what is the opposite of excitement, the more annoyance. Annoyed I got skeptical. Because, from my perspective, it feels a lot of over engineered and still very centric. So at the beginning, I thought it would be nice idea to have the different layers, to kind of have the complicated stuff, like the big fire hose as a service and different smaller service that connect to that big one to kind of lower the barrier to be part of the network, but to implement a PDA is still so much to do, and I would assume that it could be even impossible to do that with PHP on a shared hosting environment. And that's also always my kind of measurement. How can I build something that is self hostable, and that is very tricky with at proto and so, yeah, and the other tricky part that I read more and more is the how do do they call that lexical lexicon, lexicons and the incompatibility between them? I think there is a use case for that if you kind of want to have different, incompatible social networks special interest ones, but I really like the idea of having with ActivityPub having one protocol, and everyone can share whatever they want to share, And you can decide if you want to pass and use that information or simply forget that. But with AT Proto it's very limited to the lexicon. So if you we are talking about long form content, if you want to share something that is compatible with Bluesky, the platform, not the protocol. You have to use the limit of the 500 characters, and that is even worse than the actual situation with long form content in the fediverse. So either you have to limit what you share, or you have to build a new lexicon and be incompatible with Bluesky. And from my experience over the last five years, it's not that people want to have a decentralized social network because of the decentral part, but they want to connect with the big social networks. So building something on top of AT Proto that is very limited to blogs would not be the same as being compatible with the big Bluesky platform. So from that perspective, I'm not that excited about AT Proto, at least yet.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, you make some excellent points there, particularly on the long form content side, which, as you say, you know, there's a character, there's a hard character limit on, on Bluesky posts and with, with ActivityPub, it's, it's variable, I guess we should say, and I know you guys have been working on, thinking about how to change that on ActivityPub, which I'm excited to talk about. But before we get there, John, do you any thoughts you have on AT Proto, as you've been looking at that?
John O’Nolan:
Yeah, I'm a big fan. I think I described myself as pro, pro website, more than pro protocol. First and foremost, a big believer in you want to have your own website, you want it to be available, whatever you publish be available to as many people as possible. And I do about whatever means possible. But any any decentralization is good. Decentralization, in my mind, it's kind of fascinating. It feels like AT Proto and ActivityPub have come from almost opposite schools of thought, religions, if you will, or perspectives. You've got web standards fanatics that created ActivityPub, who are all this is open. This is web standards based. This is going to be for everyone. There's no company, no one's in charge. This is how we do it. You go, how the fuck are we going to scale this thing? And we'll figure that out at some point. And approach team is like, we built Twitter. We know all the problems with scaling one of these things. It's a disaster. We're going to make a protocol that scales. And you go, Hey, but what about the whole web standards? You know, decentralization? They're like, oh, we'll figure that out later. And somewhere in the middle of of these two schools of thought is, I think the right answer. And I think both AT Proto and ActivityPub have a tremendous amount they could learn from each other. Sometimes, therefore feels like they want to. Other times it feels like they're less keen. But it's, it's one I'm watching with a lot of interest. I'm big fan of Jay Graber and quite a few of the team over there that are working on AT Proto and Bluesky. It's had incredible traction since the last round of elections, for obvious reasons. And so far, we've been experimenting with the bridge so anyone can bridge ActivityPub into AT Proto using Bridgy Fed, which is functional. It feels like a bit of a workaround, still, I think it's going to be difficult to really explain that. So get it to click for non technical users, but it's a good first step. I think we have a lot of figuring out to do across bridging protocols still, that's going to take some time, but overall, I think it's quite exciting to have competing technologies that are broadly trying to accomplish the same things, because competition usually drives innovation. It doesn't always make it the smoothest ride to get there, but a little, a little competition often a good thing.
Mike McCue:
So there is a shared vision, and they're they're different, you know, different levels of progress on different dimensions of that vision, but I agree with you that there is a lot to learn from each other, and it's a net benefit that we have a large group of users that are only growing larger, who are on this overall connected social web. You know, some people think of the fediverse it's only an ActivityPub we I think of, I've always thought of the fediverse as the broader concept of people connected on the open web, and, and, and I think that, like, you know, that vision is very much shared. And I think like, when you when you come back to like, you know, you're a writer, you hit publish, how many likes? How many replies roll in? How do people, how many people actually are on the other side? Just discover what you wrote. And there is a huge increase in audience on AT Proto. And to leave those folks out in the cold, seems like it would be, you know, a big miss, a big missed opportunity. And so I think, you know, one obvious way of doing this is the bridge, right? And I so it sounds like this is something you guys have been thinking about. Like, for example, the bridge today is an opt out or, sorry, opt in model. So if you create an account for your blog on ActivityPub, are you, does it? Are you prominently saying, Hey, you should also bridge it to to Bluesky? Is that is that kind of like built into the flow so that you get access to all of the people that are using Bluesky and AT Proto?
John O’Nolan:
Yeah, we're just starting to do that now. I think it's because, only because I was debugging yesterday. I think it's at B sky, dot, grid, dot g y, at B sky, dot brid, dot g y, you follow that account now all your ActivityPub stuff, shows up on a Bluesky profile. Good. You first have to know what that thing is. Then you have to search for it, then you have to go to the profile, then you have to click follow. And you have to understand why we are abstracting away all of that into a single button that says, connect to Bluesky, and then that just happens in the background, and we show you a link to the profile. So I think if all goes to plan, we had a little bug come up this week, but that may be by the time this is out, that may already be live in the products. And unfortunately, we're having to do the same thing for Threads, because while Threads is ActivityPub native Threads actually won't allow your account to show up in Threads unless you first interact with Threads in some way. You have to follow like reply to something on Threads, and then Threads acknowledges your existence. So we're gonna have the same connects, the Threads button for entirely different reasons that are Meta hand wringing about policy, essentially. But yeah, two buttons to try and push some of this complexity into the background and make it a little bit easier for users, just to have a sense of these other channels are available. I can enable them.
Matthias Pfefferle:
For me, I really personally, as a geek, I like the idea of having a bridge, but from an end user perspective, it makes it even worse, because you still have to understand how these new email like identifiers for the blog work, and then you get another one with a very cryptic sub domain, play with the top level domain, wordy thing. So I'm yeah, it works quite well. And Ryan is a ninja, yeah, but from a from a user flow, usability perspective, this is not and this is at least not perfect for the normal self hosting, WordPress, shared hosting..
John O’Nolan:
Ryan mentioned one nice trick to me yesterday, which is that he can do pass through domain verification so to not have the weird Bridgy handle. He says it's possible that you could have, you know, if you’re pfefferle dot blog, I think, no, you could have that be your…
Matthias Pfefferle:
No, it's a German wordplay thingy. Notiz.blog
John O’Nolan:
Notiz.blog. You could be Notiz.blog on Blue Sky by passing through the what is it? Domain verification through the bridge, a common validation, but that's possible.
Mike McCue:
I mean, we definitely are in a sort of, you know, early adopter phase, for sure, but as you get these things wired up and you see the direct benefit, it's it's truly amazing. You guys have been looking at how to integrate long form content much more natively into the protocol itself, right? So tell us about that. How do you think? How do you How are you thinking about that? What are some of those sort of core principles you're focused on there?
John O’Nolan:
I think we've had a bit of a lucky streak in some ways, in that conceptually, what we're doing is very similar to email newsletters. And email newsletters have always been a thing, but they've sort of taken on a new life and popularity with platforms like Substack that have obviously grown very quickly in the last few years. And so people have developed an understanding of I publish something, it goes on a website, it also gets sent to people's email inboxes. I have a bit more control, because I own the email list. And then there's also this kind of social dynamic of everyone who's on Substack can follow other people on Substack. And so there's this familiarity of a new thing that has caught on, and has been the, you know, one of the technologies of the moment, and the kind of COVID, post COVID era that is very easy to point to and go, it's like that, but not funded by Andreessen Horowitz, and going to follow the usual giant VC path that typically ends in creators getting screwed at the end of it. So there's easy parallels from the standard is a bit like email in many ways, and there's a popular, mainstream technology that's comparable in how you use it. So the story we've been able to sell around long form content is one that people are more easily able to understand or wrap their heads around now than I think they would have been three or four years ago. And then for the people who've been on the web a bit for a longer time, you'd say it's like RSS, but social. It's like RSS, but it's got social feeds built in. But essentially, it's the same experience as a centralized publishing platform, whether that be Medium or Substack or Tumblr, where you have full articles that you can follow and you have a feed of people you follow and what they are writing more than 140 characters, and equally, you can push your content out to that same network of people who follow you. So it's email subscriptions as a public following mechanism on the basis of articles, and ActivityPub has always had support for these different types of content, Pixelfed us images like Instagram. Mastodon is micro blogs. They call them notes like Twitter. And it has also always had support for the article object which was has always intended to be, you know, long form content and posts we other than WordPress and now Ghost and Flipboard, there has, it hasn't been as widely adopted yet, but there's some fast, fast movement now happening in the space, and all of us regularly talk to one another, often in the form of, hey, I posted a thing. It's not showing up on your platform. Can you figure out? Like, what's the interoperability conversations? But it's exciting.
Mike McCue.
The longformers.
John O’Nolan:
Yeah, indeed.
Matthias Pfefferle:
And I think the biggest, the biggest challenge is, how can we bring that to other platforms? I think it's an easy win to support, to have support between Ghost and write freely and WordPress. But how can we get long form content shown as nice as images and notes on mastodon? And there is quite some history, because in the early days of the WordPress plugin, people always assumed or always wanted to have their full article posted on Mastodon, because it's no longer cross posting, the content can live directly in the fediverse So and Mastodon had has not very good article support, at least back in the days. So we had to trick Mastodon a lot and reuse their note type, but sending the full content. And the funny thing is, if you post an art, if you posted an article on Mastodon, they would strip it down to only show the header. But if you would send a note, you could even send more characters that the LIM then the limit Mastodon had itself. So if you use the article, you would shown up like a note, and if you would use a note, it showed up as an article, which is absurd, but yeah, and so it took quite a bad directory. So we all messed up the standard a lot, and I think we are now working on properly define how we share long form content in a for a variety of different platforms, and how we can share that so that The receiving platform has different opportunities to fall back, for example, to a node on excerpt and to not be forced to show the full content and to break their UI, for example.
John O’Nolan:
Yeah, one of the differences in federating articles rather than notes is, of course, articles have rich formatting. Notes might have a link and a mention, maybe bold text, but articles have headings and lists, sometimes embedded media and interactive elements and polls. They have all kinds of stuff going on. And how does that formatting work on an external platform where you have no control over the CSS. How does it show up? How does it render? These are all the, you know, the things that we're figuring out now between the different long form platforms that are interesting, and there are a lot of different concerns that both from how does it look to, you know, is it secure if I publish a JavaScript snippet in my blog post and you open it in Flipboard. Can I hijack flipboards admin credentials? Hopefully not. But we have to think about all the different potential ways in which the type of content people place within the context of an article gets used and rendered and shows up or works or doesn't work,
Mike McCue:
And presumably you're leveraging a lot of lessons and tech from email. How this is done with email today, or no?
John O’Nolan:
Half and half…
Matthias Pfefferle:
Email solved all of these problems way back in the days. So yeah, it feels like kind of fighting the same fights like how to show a rich text, email in plain tape text, maybe you can compare it to that.
John O’Nolan:
And email solved them all badly. One of the problems right, like. It's 2025 and to send an email, you still need HTML tables. Even Gmail, which is by and large, the least bad of the lot, supports only a subset of CSS standards that have been around for over a decade. So we don't want to repeat those patterns at the same time. Email is a really good benchmark for a subset of rich formatting that isn't exactly what you can get on the web. You know, there's no risk of executing bad scripts within the context of an email. You have fallbacks as a rich embed that needs a script to load, okay, maybe you like turn that into a screenshot and deliver that in an email so it's a simpler, cleaner format. So there's, there's some bits of the way email has evolved that are good reference points. And again, we've drawn on this a lot, because we already facilitate sending blog posts as email newsletters. We already have this kind of content pipeline that turns rich HTML for the web into sanitized HTML for email and now into sanitized HTML for ActivityPub, so there's definitely some parallels.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, it is. It is really interesting how we effectively are collectively getting a bit of a do-over for the web and email, right? We learned a lot of lessons like, oh, that didn't work so well, right? Version two, or maybe it's version three, or maybe it's version four. It's hard to keep track, but, but there are a lot of lessons learned and a lot of things like, yeah, we won't do that again. Or, Hey, we should do that again. It is, it is so cool to be in this moment with you guys. And one of the things that continues to come through here is that there's going to need to be a lot of collaboration between the, you know, I call it the guardians of the fediverse, you know, the people that are building the apps, the publishing tools, the analytics, the, you know, all of the backend infrastructure, the discovery engines, the the ability for us to collaborate as still, I think, a fairly small, manageable group of people right now, which is pretty cool, right? Um, it feels like the early days of the web. And I love that you guys have like this, this even, you know, more focused collaboration with among the long formers of the world were people working to get that to happen?
John O’Nolan:
Yeah, we are uniquely bad at it. I will say we could for the size of the group, which, as you say, is not large, man, we are spread across like Mastodon DMs, sometimes an email thread, other times a Discord back channel. On the other hand, it's all over the place. We could, we could get more organized here, I think, but it's a start.
Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah…and there are a lot of exciting things to come, I would say, because I think that the long form content is only the beginning, what we have to solve at first. But I think with blocks joining the fediverse, there are a lot more things to come, like the aspect of self hosting your ID on the fediverse. Like, how do you handle domain change and changes in a federated world? And there are a lot of different use cases then you know, from platforms. So that is even more exciting, I would say.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, the the era that I think we're starting to move into is one where it's not just cloning what existed in the walled garden world, but instead kind of thinking things through from first principles and from the ground up, what should the right user experience be here? What should the right architecture be? And from a user experience point of view, that's super exciting, right? We've been living in a world of like, okay, it's Twitter, but open. You know, it's like Twitter, but open, or it's like Instagram, but open, there's a huge opportunity to rethink, what are the experiences that matter here, and how does that relate to discovery. Have you guys? I assume you've been thinking about things like that. You know, as you've been building all of this, you have, do you have thoughts there?
John O’Nolan:
Yeah, my biggest thought is, we have to make it easier. We have to make it so much easier. At the moment, the we're not living up to the promise of what the fediverse could be. Yet you can get started, and you can have these initial glimmers of there's something special here, but quickly you're confronted with the rough edges of not being able to find someone by searching, or I'm following someone on Threads, but now all the images coming in from Threads are broken. Because meta do some backwards thing where they expire image URLs every 12 hours. And pulusky, how do you make that work again? What's my username? When I get there, you quickly hit a point of friction where, oh, is the glimmer of hope worth it? I think, unless you're enthusiasts like us, believes a lot to be desired. And I think this is where Bluesky has a real advantage in the way they've gone about things, is they don't have the diversity of ActivityPub in use case or products or even servers, but they do have consistency, in a way. That means people have not really been confused by Bluesky. There's like, Wait, my domain is my username, but that's about it. People understand how to use it. They can search for stuff, they can find stuff, they can follow stuff. There's not these points of friction of understanding, and that's something I think collectively, in the activity hub side of things we have to work hard to solve, and a lot of that's interoperability between products and platforms and really getting better at making some of these pain points go away and making things move smoothly, because the moment we start having to explain to users, this is because of underlying that they've switched off before you get to the next point in the sentence. So that's really top of mind for me. We have to keep making it easier. That's how I think that discovery piece is ultimately going to flourish, is whether we succeed or fail at that.
Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, I think. And we can really learn a lot from Bluesky there. And it starts with a simple idea, like Starter Packs, which is Dan Supernault from Pixelfed has some really nice ideas about that, which could be an easy, quick win. And I think the other part is, how can we, kind of decouple the identity from the platform to really have users use their domain for their identity and choose the domain independently from where they want to host their domain. I think that would solve also a lot of problems. And I'm really excited about the latest work from Mastodon with the I think it's called oxility provider, something like that, where they want to experience, where they work on, also kind of a federated, decentralized search engine, search discovery mechanism. And I hope this helps a lot. Yeah.
Mike McCue:
I'm also hopeful that there'll be completely new experiences that people will see and like, oh my god, this is amazing, and they understand how it works. It may not be like anything they've ever used before, but it's still simple. It's still, you know, enables discovery. It still is the kind of thing that people can, you know, say, I totally love this, and I understand how to use it. And that is, that is, that is definitely a quest that a lot of people are on right now. And collectively, you know, it requires a lot of collaboration. And I do think that collectively, this is the kind of thing that, you know, I feels to me like we are on a path toward making happen together. So it's been, it's been exciting to see that I am so impressed with the work that each of you guys have done. You guys are true pioneers, and the level of thinking that you've done at the architectural level and at the user experience level, and more importantly, the fact that you're not just thinking you're building and you're doing and you're shipping all the time. It's just, you know, kudos to you guys. Really incredibly grateful to have a chance to talk to you, and very grateful for the work that you do.
Matthias Pfefferle:
Thank you.
John O’Nolan:
Likewise, very happy to be here. And yeah, Julian Node BB is another one of our long form group. He makes forum software, which is like blog posts, but with replies, just called topics and comments and there's it's a really fun getting together with all these people working on different products, all the kind of similar, overlapping, sometimes competing, sometimes collaborating space. It's a blast, and it's an opportunity outside of ActivityPub, but I don't think we've had in the same type of way. So it's really nice to see protocols bringing people together who otherwise may not have had a chance to work in the same space. And that's that's special. And I think you've done a huge amount, Mike, and in that regard as well, you are the human protocol that brings a lot of us together. So thank you for your work.
Well, thanks so much for listening! You can find John at john.onolan.org/ and Matthias at pfefferle.dev.
You can find Mike at @mike@flipboard.social.
Big thanks to our editors, Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
If you’re interested in the topics covered in this podcast, check out Surf, a new product from Flipboard that lets you surf the social web and create your own custom feeds. Learn more at surf.social.
Until next time, we’ll see you on the social web!